Bonaccia d’Argento

In the Bonaccia d’Argento wallpaper I have stopped the moment when the wind drops and the sea becomes a mirror. It belongs to Luminism, the school of painting that dissolves light into thin glazes, laid one over the other until it vibrates from within the canvas: reproduced here as a genuine museum art photograph, with brushwork and pigment still visible on the surface of the painting.

The scene shows a sheltered inlet between low rounded headlands, where glassy water holds a small fleet at anchor: two or three schooners and sloops gathered in the foreground, their masts like thin vertical strokes, their sails loose and fallen in soft folds, never filled with wind. Further off, towards a horizon veiled in haze, other smaller and paler sails dissolve into the light. The horizon stays low, almost central, and the water doubles every shape in a subdued reflection, among pearled ivory, silvery blue-grey and warm umbers in the planking.

Close up one discovers the barely traced rigging, the light wake at each hull, the grainy modelling of the distant clouds: details that reward the slow eye, the one WallZad gives to every wallpaper, drawn and printed with the same craft with which a painter lays his last glaze. It is an image of suspension rather than of calm, an invitation to stop as those sails have stopped, in no hurry to set off again. To bring Bonaccia d’Argento into a room is to let that calm inhabit the wall, in any domestic or hospitality interior made to breathe with its own natural light.